Okay, I wasn't going to do this, but here is a small additional snippet from The Gordian Protocol.
I'm going to try really hard not to give into the temptation to hand out more of these, especially since Jacob and I still haven't done the copy edit with Baen, but still . . . .
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Chapter One
Castle Rock University, 2017 CE
“You’re kidding me.” Benjamin Schröder sat back in his chair, shaking his head in disbelief. “You’re serious about this crap?!”
“I’m very serious, Doctor Schröder,” the thin, sharp-faced man seated behind the large, polished desk informed him severely. Patrick O’Hearn, the History Department’s chairman, was a good twenty years older than Schröder, but he’d always struck the younger man as a spoiled brat who’d never quite grown up. Schröder knew he wasn’t the most tactful or “process oriented” of individuals, but O’Hearn possessed a unique ability to make him think longingly of utterly inappropriate physical responses to “micro-aggressions.” Of course, in O’Hearn’s universe, the clarity of his understanding — thoroughly validated by everyone else living inside his bubble — meant he was incapable of micro-aggressions. All he was doing was “speaking truth to power” . . . especially when he dragged in a junior member of his own department for “counseling.” Aside from his voice, which was actually a surprisingly pleasant baritone, the older man represented every single thing Schröder disliked about academia . . . except for the whiny students unalterably opposed to enduring the contamination of alternative viewpoints. The only reasons students like that bothered him less than O’Hearn — and he had to admit, they ran a very close second — was that he kept reminding himself of what his mother had taught him as a teenager: ignorance and even narrowmindedness can be fixed; stupid is forever. And willful stupidity like O’Hearn’s was especially galling. He suspected that the two of them would have cordially disliked one another under any imaginable circumstances; under the circumstances which actually applied, “dislike” was far too pale a verb.
“What happened to my right to file a response?” he demanded now. “I’ve got ten days to respond even to a formal grievance, let alone an Administrative Review!”
“Of course you do, Doctor.” O’Hearn emphasized the academic title with a certain spiteful courtesy. “And if you choose to exercise that right, no one would even consider denying it to you. That right is absolutely guaranteed under the Student Grievance Policy and Procedures. I simply thought — purely as a courtesy to a professional colleague, you understand — that it might be expedient to . . . advise you in this matter.”
Schröder clenched his teeth and cautioned himself against dwelling any further on those politically incorrect but highly satisfactory responses to O’Hearn’s bright smile. The most satisfactory item on the menu would have included a direct kinesthetic rearrangement of the smile in question, which would hardly help his case at the moment. Some of the verbal responses which sprang to mind would have been almost equally unhelpful, however well-deserved and apropos they might have been.
“Should I take it, then,” he said instead, after counting slowly to ten, “that Dean Thompson’s taken an official position on this?”
“Oh, by no means! That would be highly inappropriate at this stage of the process.” O’Hearn shook his head, blue eyes gleaming with poorly disguised satisfaction behind the lenses of his wireframe glasses. “She would never attempt to intervene or pressure anyone at such an early stage of the grievance process. At the same time, of course, she has to be aware of remedial options and any . . . potential sanctions. And, as your department chair, I thought it best to ascertain from her on your behalf exactly what those options might be after Ms. Kikuchi-Bennett raised her concerns with me.”
“How kind of you,” Schröder said, then bit his tongue mentally as O’Hearn’s eyes flickered with mingled anger and satisfaction.
“You are a member of my department,” the chairman pointed out. He didn’t add the words “unfortunately” or “for the moment, at least,” Schröder observed. Or not out loud, anyway. “And I’m sure you’re aware of how seriously Castle Rock University takes any potential discrimination or harassment, especially by faculty.”
“Oh, I’m well aware of that,” Schröder replied. “I’m still a little confused about exactly how I’m supposed to have discriminated against or harassed Ms. Kikuchi-Bennett, though.”
“The creation of a hostile classroom environment is the very definition of harassment, Doctor,” O’Hearn said rather more frostily. “And attacking an undergraduate’s gender identity and political views in front of an entire class certainly creates exactly that sort of environment.”
“I’m not aware of having attacked Ms. Kikuchi-Bennett’s gender identity — or political views — in any way.”
“Sarcasm, ridicule, and denigration constitute ‘attacks’ in most people’s view, Doctor.” O’Hearn’s tone was positively icy now, but the satisfaction in his eyes was brighter.
“No doubt they would . . . if I’d done any of them.” Schröder felt his own temper rising and stepped on it firmly. It wasn’t easy, and he felt the ghost of his father standing at his shoulder. The old man probably would have already ripped out O’Hearn’s tonsils and wrapped them around his neck for a bowtie.
Not the best image for him to be dwelling upon at the moment.
“I’m afraid three independent witnesses support Ms. Kikuchi-Bennett’s interpretation of your remarks, Doctor.”
“And am I permitted to know who these three independent witnesses might be?”
“I’m afraid that’s privileged information under the University’s privacy procedures. At this time, of course.” O’Hearn flashed another of those thin, smug, satisfied smiles. “If the process continues to the formal grievance stage, however, I’m sure you’ll receive copies of their statements.”
“But not their identities?”
“It’s the content of their statements, not their identities, that would be relevant,” O’Hearn pointed out, “and the University has a legal and moral responsibility to protect their privacy, if only to avoid any appearance of retaliation against them. I’m sure you can understand the Chancellor’s position on that point, Doctor. You would certainly be within your legal rights to seek that information if you should choose to appeal the Grievance Committee’s formal ruling in other venues. Of course, at that point the Legal Department would be legally and morally obligated to protect that information until such time as the courts directed its disclosure.”
“Oh, of course.”
Schröder wished O’Hearn’s attitude had surprised him. Given academia’s taste for witch hunts, though, the surprise would come from any other response. Besides, he had a pretty shrewd notion which of Kikuchi-Bennett’s friends had chosen to support the transgender student’s allegations. If he was right, the frightening thing was that at least two of them were undoubtedly completely sincere in their belief that he had, indeed, brutally and viciously assailed Kikuchi-Bennett in front of their entire class. Their hypersensitive, exquisitely quivering antennae would have left them with no other conclusion, especially after Kikuchi-Bennett “rebutted” his comments not by refuting — or even considering — his reasoning or his evidence, but by scorning them as “typical of the racist and homophobic patriarchy’s callous dismissal of any dissenting viewpoint.” In his experience, once those labels were deployed, any possibility of rational discourse had left the building.
He thought — briefly, and not very seriously — about pointing out to O’Hearn that what he’d said was simply that women hadn’t acquired the franchise in the United States at the point of a gun, but by convincing the majority of men that in a just society interested in living up to the Declaration of Independence’s nobly espoused principles they should have had the franchise all along, just as African Americans should have had their freedom all along. The suffragettes' victory in the 19th Amendment had been achieved because their stance had been correct all along and their moral pressure had convinced enough male voters of that to support the amendment’s passage. Since the discussion had been about the evolution of legal and societal viewpoints in the United States, and about the fashion in which protest movements and organized political pressure groups had achieved change, it was difficult for him to see that as even misogynistic, far less racist, homophobic, or gender phobic.
It was Kikuchi-Bennett who’d raised a hand, rejected his argument, and asserted that only someone speaking from the “privileged platform of the white male patriarchy” could possibly have made such a ludicrous assertion. As someone who was neither female nor black, his “patronizing dismissal of their struggle” both demeaned them and revealed his own “blinkered” inability to see the truth hidden in the “so-called history written by that same white male patriarchy,” and segued from there into the necessity for “free speech zones” where such “hate speech and shameless historical revisionism” as his — which was particularly offensive coming from someone speaking from a “privileged position of power” — would not be tolerated.
Maybe I should have pointed out that my family probably knows a little more about that whole African American thing than most non-Black families, he thought. In fact, he’d considered doing just that, although not very hard. Claiming personal credit for the moral superiority of ancestors who’d been dead for a century or two was about as intellectually dishonest as an argument came. Besides, it would have been totally irrelevant to her. And certainly not germane to the course’s subject matter.
Aware that Kikuchi-Bennett’s passion, however misguided he found it, was completely genuine, he’d dialed back his instinctive response. Apparently replying with the observation that “traditionally, college is where we’re supposed to challenge our own conceptions and preconceptions” had been . . . an insufficient dial-back.
Personally, he would have preferred to demonstrate the illogic and inconsistency of Kikuchi-Bennett’s arguments in a reasoned debate from which both of them might have learned a little something, if only respect for opposing viewpoints. It would have been nice if, failing that, he’d at least been able to shut the tirade down in less than the fifteen minutes of the rest of his students’ time which had been squandered to absolutely no good purpose. And, oh, for the long-vanished days when he could have suggested that Kikuchi-Bennett was always free to depart his classroom and refuse to return to it ever again.
I wonder how Mom would’ve dealt with this? he wondered, only half whimsically. In fact, he had a pretty good idea how Doctor Joséphine Schröder would have responded, especially here at her own alma mater. Of course, we probably shouldn’t call it an alma mater anymore, either. “Mother” is so sexist. Alma parente would probably be better . . . of course, that’s a masculine gendered noun, isn’t it? Damn, Latin is such a sexist language! Just like French, Spanish, and Italian. I guess we’ll have to find a new noun that’s neither.
Fortunately for her, his mother had acquired tenure at Emory two years before Benjamin’s birth. The climate had been just a little different then, and by the time the rot had truly set in, it would have taken a very hardy individual to pick a fight with “Doctor Joe,” who was famous for her ability to vivisect faulty reasoning and absolute death on fabricated or cherry-picked “facts.” Besides, even the faculty members who’d most strongly disagreed with her politics — aside from a handful of much younger, recent additions — had admired and respected her too deeply to consider this sort of nonsense, and her own students had loved her.
And the truth was that as infuriating as O’Hearn was, the man was about to do exactly what Benjamin wanted him to do. Under the circumstances, mentioning anything about rabbits, tar, or brier patches would probably send the man’s blood pressure through the roof, but really . . . .
). That then makes his job easier when it comes to fine tuning certain details or adjusting a character's voice to his liking.
